BSD

This section is for people who are new to FreeBSD. If you're already familiar with it, you may want to skip down to the next section.

Originally developed from the Unix-based Berkeley Software Distribution, FreeBSD is among the oldest extant Unix derivatives. It is currently maintained and improved by a large team of programmers, and supported monetarily by individual and corporate donors.

From FreeBSD you can generally expect a modern, Unix-like operating system, heavily armed with network services and tools. It is relatively easy to install, configure, and administer FreeBSD on servers or desktop machines. FreeBSD is scalable up to at least 12 CPUs (this is as many parallel CPUs as it has been officially tested with), which includes SMP support for Hyper-Threading and multiple cores.

Aside from the programs included in the base system, FreeBSD offers extra software via pre-compiled binary packages; and a Ports system, which functions much like a less automatic version of Gentoo's Portage software management framework. From Ports you can automatically download, compile, and install more than 13,000 programs. There are few applications in the free software canon that are not available in the FreeBSD Ports tree. There is also an available Linux binary compatibility layer which is efficient enough to say that there is no noticeable performance difference between Linux binaries and FreeBSD binaries running on the same system.

A common misconception about FreeBSD is that Apple OS X is based on it. While some of the FreeBSD userland programs are used in Darwin (which is the operating system that forms the basis for OS X), the OS X kernel is based on Mach, not FreeBSD, so OS X is not "based on" or "developed from" FreeBSD in the traditional sense (such as the way OpenBSD was forked from NetBSD in 1995).